


Deicide

by Alvitr



Category: Serial Experiments Lain, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cyberpunk, Gen, MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:12:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alvitr/pseuds/Alvitr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Present day, present time.</p>
<p>Loki attracts the attention of the Omnipresence of the Wired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deicide

  
_deicide:_ the killing of a god 

People only have substance within the memories of other people.  
\- _Serial Experiments Lain_  


The first time that he saw her -- for certain -- was on that long ride through the desert in the back of the mortals’ vehicle.

He was exhausted. Traveling through the portal to this world had drained him completely. It had felt as though every cell of his body had been ripped apart, violently, and then reassembled, hopefully in the correct order. He was sweating and shivering at the same time, muscles spasming out of his control, vision occasionally spinning, the only thing whole and firm in this world his grip on the scepter -- _hold on, hold on, and focus_. Every bump in the dirt road seemed to shake up the loose particles of his body again, and he felt as though the physical bounds of it were tenuous at best; too much disturbance and he might fly apart, turn into nothing but vapor and dust. He breathed deeply and tried to ride it out. He focused on the desert gliding past him, the clouds of dirt flung into the air as they passed, the moon -- half full, impersonal, and the centerpiece of a night sky nothing like the one of his childhood, or of his more recent home, the world of nightmares …

… That was when he saw her.

A solitary figure, bathed in moonlight, dressed in a thin white dress, short dark hair whipped about by the wind; for some reason he noticed she was barefoot, there in the middle of the desert and spikey shrubs, and it was a detail that stuck out in his mind. She reached out to him, her mouth open as though she were about to say something.

Then she was gone. 

He stared hard at the spot that she had existed so briefly in, but it faded away into the dust before long. 

It was but a trick of the mind.

He was so very tired, after all.

*

The next time he saw her, he was deep in the bowels of some dripping, dirty Midgardian facility, while his pathetic minions scurried about him.

The scepter glowed, and he was called.

Oh, how he loathed this place, this craggy floating rock, so deeply buried in the hidden, smothering, stifling places between universes that not even Heimdall’s eyes could see it. Better he had died, back broken on the roots of Yggdrasil, than ended up here, but he had been grateful at first … for a time. 

Now he had but this one chance to escape it. And as he came back to himself, his heart thudding painfully and the taste of blood and stardust filling his mouth, he felt the ghostlike touch of a hand graze his shoulder.

He froze, and then turned his head slowly. In his peripheral vision he saw her hand. It glowed slightly, iridescent and somehow pure, and seemed both there and not there. Slowly (his instincts, which should have been screaming, seemed to have been lulled to sleep) his gaze followed up a long, bare arm, until he was staring into two dark, heavy lidded eyes.

Her mouth opened again, a breath drawing in, as it had in the desert. It seemed like every inch of him waited to hear what she would say.

“Sir, Dr. Selvig must speak to you immediately.”

The spell was broken. He blinked, and she was gone. All that remained was a tingling sensation all along his arm, and Barton, eyes cold and blank, standing at attention before him.

*

As he waited on the rocky promontory for the fool he had once stupidly called brother, the weakling clothed in metal, and the frozen soldier fought, she came to him again. He heard her footsteps in the grass, felt her presence like a thousand waves of static all along his skin. 

She was small, barely reaching his chest, and seemed delicate, like all of these children of Midgard, but something in her terrified him. Until she turned her cool gaze to him, and he felt … pacified. Calmer than he had in centuries.

She reached up and touched his cheek. In that instant, he felt alarmingly vulnerable -- exposed, open, and aware of everything. It hurt. It was familiar. He had felt this once before, when his fingers had slipped, and he had been swallowed by nothingness.

Her mouth opened to speak. 

This time, she was not interrupted.

“We are …” she said slowly, in a gentle, girlish voice, “... connected.”

“Brother!” Thor boomed, and pulled his arm, jerking him away from her gentle, fearful touch.

Her presence, and all that he had glimpsed with it, winked out of sight.

*

He saw her many places after that, but not so close. He caught glimpses of her, in monitors and windows, in the curved reflection of the glass containment cell, watching him, impassively. What was it she tried to say to him? Was she a sending by the Other, to spy on him? Was she some associate of S.H.I.E.L.D. which Barton and Selvig and his other slaves had been unaware of when he had questioned them? 

Or was she something else? Something more powerful?

When he considered her, she unnerved him. She was a wild card, an unknown, who might destroy all his plans. But when he caught sight of her, he was overwhelmed … with hope … and a profound despair.

*

He was nothing but pain. Entombed in this spot where the beast had left him, unable, or unwilling, to move, he could not tell. Victory was slipping, had slipped, already, from his grasp, if he had ever grasped it to begin with. He closed his eyes, and imagined the void swallowing him again, and longed bitterly for it. 

When he opened them again, she was staring down at him.

It took several tries before he could make his mouth work. “Who … are you?” he gasped. “Why do you follow me?”

She tilted her head thoughtfully, then bent over and reached one hand out to him. His fingers twitched, hesitating, before he raised his arm and took her hand. Again that sensation. Like holding pure light, painful but lovely. She helped him rise to his feet, and stumble from the crater his body had made. She held his shoulders, steadying him. Ah, how far he had fallen. To be propped up by a slip of girl. But she was not just that, was she?

“Who are you?” he repeated.

“I am everything,” she said, “and nothing.” She let him go, and backed away. “I am of this world, and outside of it. Created by it, and a creator of it.”

“You are a god,” he said, realization dawning.

“No,” she said, firmly. “I am not.”

“What do you want of me?”

“I have watched you,” she said, “for a long time now. I watched you as you fell. That was when you first came to my notice.”

He drew a breath and found he could not let it out.

“It changed you,” she said. “That place. It changed you forever.” She looked away. “It’s all right. It changed me, too.”

“How do you know about the void?” he whispered. “How did you see me?”

“On this world, we call it the Wired. Or we do now. We’ve called it many things. I live there,” she said. “Or, more accurately, I am part of it.” She touched one hand to her heart, then, stretched the other to touch the curved bow of gold on his breastplate. “And it is a part of me, just as it is now a part of you.”

A sharp pang went through him. He understood, suddenly, the feelings of peace when he looked at her. She knew. She understood what no one else ever could, had seen what no one else had ever seen … the inexpressible horror and beauty of what existed, and yet didn’t exist, between the physical worlds. The place where they connected.

Her hand fell from his chest, and she began to pace the room. “I knew a man like you once,” she said. “He saw infinity, and it drove him mad. He thought the power it gave him made him a god. But he was wrong.” She smiled. “He thought he made me, but he didn’t realize some part of me had existed all along. He merely gave me a form.” 

“What happened to this man?” Loki asked.

She looked him in the eyes. “I saved him,” she said, “though he didn’t want to be saved. I saved them all. And I could save you too.”

“How?”

Her hand touched his brow. “By making you forget.”

Loki’s eyes widened, and he stepped away. “No,” he said.

“Let me do this for you,” she said. She looked sad. “I can erase it all. I can delete everything that haunts you right out of existence.”

“It matters not,” he said hoarsely, “it still happened.”

She shook her head. “Memory can be rewritten,” she said, “and so can reality. If we don’t remember something, it never happened.”

“Would it change all this?” he asked, gesturing widely, his arms encompassing the ruined room, and everything it symbolized.

“No,” she said. “You are just one point in the spiderweb of this eventuality. The cause of it is broader than you.”

He hesitated. “Then I …” His voice failed him for a moment, and then he regained it. “I don’t want to forget.”

She looked at him, questioningly.

“It’s too late,” he said, looking out at the broken windows, the broken city beyond them. “At the very least I’ll know why I brought myself to this.”

“There is another way,” she said, softly.

“Oh?”

“It’s more drastic. And it could change everything. But you would not forget.”

He waited. 

“Everyone else would.”

Loki’s fists clenched. “Do you mean to say … you could write me out of existence?”

“You’d still exist,” she said, “just not for the rest of reality.”

“And that’s what became of you, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled. His heart was fluttering madly in his chest. “You erased yourself, little God of the Void.”

She looked at him levelly. “I am not a god,” she said. “I am Lain.”

He took Lain’s hand in his own. “Do it, then,” he said. 

“You’re choosing the loneliest path,” she said. “I know. I walk it.”

“Loneliness is freedom,” he said. “I thought it did not exist, but it seems I was wrong.”

*

A thousand years ago, Odin returned to Asgard, carrying the Casket of Ancient Winters, and nothing more.

Thor grew up an only child. He was crowned king, and was not always a good one.

Laufey longed for vengeance.

Thanos and the Other bided their time. It would come, some day.

Jane Foster studied the stars, remote and incapable of touching them as she longed to do. 

The Avengers found an enemy to align themselves against, eventually.

*

Lain and Loki watched it all. She led him to those places, tiptoeing through the void, and Loki was not afraid. 

“Is it better this way?” he wondered.

“It’s not good or bad,” she said. “It just …”

“... is,” he finished for her.

They both ignored the tears that slid persistently down his cheeks. 

“Would you like tea?” Lain asked. “And madeleines. I’ll make them for both of us.”

Silently, he nodded. Lain took Loki’s hand and led him away.

**Author's Note:**

> I've kind of muddied the waters here, combining the concept of the void with the Wired. But one is the space between worlds and the other is the space between consciousnesses. I kind of feel like they run together. 
> 
> [Serial Experiments Lain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain).
> 
> [Madeleines](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r92vMn_lSUM&feature=share&list=FLfXn0K4hcInjIfk1Ho5tJZQ).


End file.
